Jeff Adair / CC
GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Healthcare officials continue to voice concerns about the capacity of hospitals across the area, especially as they work to treat more non-COVID-19 patients.
Between COVID patients and those being treated for other needs, some hospitals in Green Bay and the Fox Valley are reaching their bed capacity. But the rising COVID cases are beginning to cause some issues.
“It’s all the beds that they’re taking that they need that we can’t fill with the other needs of the community – the heart attacks, the strokes, the car accidents,” said Prevea Health CEO Dr. Ashok Rai. “If there is a significant car accident and we needed 10 beds – for example, if there is a pileup if it became icy this week – we wouldn’t be able to take care of everybody locally. Those are the types of situations we’re running into.”
While there might be a number of physical beds still available – hospitals could still be nearing capacity because you still need someone to treat the people in those beds.
“A bed is not just a bed you see sitting in the hallway. It’s somebody that needs a nurse a respiratory therapist. We’re running out of staff as well,” Rai told the WTAQ Morning News with Matt and Earl. “They get sick, they come home, somebody exposes them, and then they can’t work for 10 days or longer depending on their illness. That’s creating this kind of nightmare situation for us where we may have one or two beds open for patients that might be coming in, and trying to discharge those that don’t need to be in the hospital.”
He also points out that patients coming to Green Bay from Oconto Falls or Marinette requiring a higher level of care have a more than 50/50 chance of being re-routed to a different hospital, due to the immense amount of stress on the healthcare system and the infrastructure to provide care for everyone.
That stress, Rai says, isn’t something people planned on when building the facilities several decades ago.
“They didn’t design it to take care of a pandemic on top of the normal illnesses we take care of,” Rai said. “We deal with this many car accidents, this many strokes, this many heart attacks. We have bad influenza season, let’s make sure we’re ready for that. But we didn’t layer a pandemic on top of those designs. Nobody would. And that’s what’s kind of creating that collapse right now.”
For current statewide hospitalization numbers, head to the Wisconsin Hospital Association website. For the numbers in Brown County, head to StayHealthyBC.com.
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